Child marriage

Globally 12 million girls under 18 years of age enter formal or informal marriages every year. Child marriage increases girls’ risk of early and dangerous pregnancies, limits their formal and informal educational opportunities and increases their risk of poverty. 

Gendered social norms interact both with other norms and with underlying factors such as poverty and limited education and economic opportunities in different contexts to increase the likelihood of child marriage.

ALIGN resources explore insights from recent research on child marriage, effective approaches to changing norms around child marriage, and ways of measuring change.